Rene Burri Photographs.

RENE BURRI PHOTOGRAPHS

BY MICAHEL KOETZLE New York: Phaidon, 2004. 450pp./$95 (hb)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Rene Burri, Photographs is a retrospective book of photographs covering a period of 50 years. This book was published earlier this year while a retrospective exhibition of the photographer's work was co-produced and shown by La Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris (Jan. 14-March 14, 2004), and Le Musee de I'Elysee in Lausanne (June 26-Oct. 24, 2004). Not unlike most of the books published by Phaidon, a company that has specialized in art books and has become most active in the field of photography books. Rene Burri, Photographs comes as a thick and heavy volume. It is mainly composed of Burri's black and white images edited by Hans-Michael Koetzle. Koetzle is the editor of Leica World, and himself a photographer whose contribution in this monograph consists in Burri's biography, followed by a bibliography, a filmography, and a list of the photographer's numerous exhibitions.

Following in the steps of a previous publication of Rene Burri's works, One World, in 1984, the structure of Rene Burri, Photographs, is organized in 21 "chapters". Most of these chapters are related to specific locations that Burri visited in his many travels around the world. A few of these chapters stand as exceptions to this rule. Among them, the last chapter is dedicated to "Contemporaries, Friends, 1965-2000" and presents mostly images of artists and photographers. One chapter is dedicated to Le Corbusier, one to Picasso, another one to NASA (following "The USA"), two deal with continents: "Latin America" (following "Argentina"l), and "Africa." All the images in the "gallery" part of the book are in black and white in spite of Burri's numerous color assignments for various magazines. Obviously this choice reinforces the "Magnum" look of the work, the heritage of photographers and world travelers such as Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Werner Bischof. This editorial choice certainly deprives the reader of a broader and deeper perspective and comprehension of Burri's oeuvre. Another publishing/editing strategy gets in the way of the potential esthetic connection that readers could establish with the photographs: many images are double-spreads where the gutter of the book plays an intrusive role, and paradoxically (if compared to the decision to exclude color images from the book as mentioned above) definitely evokes magazine lay-outs.

The double-page strategy and the rather good but plain quality of the printing are not completely satisfactory from a viewer's point of view. As said before, Burri's style belongs to the Magnum school of photography, one that is known for the emphasis given to content and form. This esthetic works through precise composition and a total use of the frame implying two guide-lines: firstly, a perfect organization of the content of the frame meant to synthesize the experience of the photographer and the events he or she witnessed; secondly, no cropping occurred during the printing process, and as a result what the viewer sees is exactly what the photographers saw in their view-finders. Burri's personal style belies his influences from Werner Bischof to Henri Cartier-Bresson. He was introduced to Magnum members by fellow member Werner Bischof in the early 1950s, but only joined the agency as a full member in 1959. The power of the frame, enhanced in Cartier-Bresson's case by the omnipresent black line around the image itself, has been such a driving force in the Magnum esthetic that the gutter of the book, somewhat splitting the photograph, feels like anathema, and interferes with the viewer's visual pleasure. The control of printing costs and the fact that the book was simultaneously published in German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English--a typical contemporary publishing strategy also adopted by many publishers among whom are Schirmer-Mosel, Scalo, and Taschen--allowed a voluminous book within "reasonable cost", one that provides an extensive survey of Burri's photography as well as detailed information on his life and accomplishments. The layout of the book echoes the one used for the recent VII (deMO, 2003), whose typography became problematic if your eyesight was not excellent and whose "logic" had to be learned. That departure by Phaidon from more classical book designs is a move that started after Nan Goldin's 2003 Devil's Playground (also $95 and over 400 pages thick.) was abandoned for the just published The Fat Baby: Stories by Eugene Richards (to be reviewed in our next issue). It could be seen a deliberate attempt in this particular book to reference Burri's training at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts, a school under Bauhaus influence with such teachers as johannes Itten and Hans Finsler. The hybridization between the Bauhaus esthetic and more contemporary trends in book design does not seem completely successful and may need improvement, Compared to Richards's images in The Fat Baby, the reproduction of Burri's photographs lacks density and contrast, a choice already illustrated in Cartier-Bresson's recent books and shows (The Europeans in a 1997 show in London and a book published by Bullfinch in 1998, or the 2003 Henri Cartier-Bresson, De qui s'agit-il? (The man, the Image, and the World) by Robert Delpire; are these just coincidences?

At this point in time Rene Burri, Photographs stands as a unique testimony and retrospective of the photographer's 50 years in photography. It is a book executed under his supervision and edited by a fellow photographer and editor who has a deep understanding of the man and his work. In spite of a few small flaws, it stands as a useful reference book and confirms Phaidon's interesting publishing strategy; one that provides us in the arts and education with reasonably priced (considering the volume of information printed) and highly illustrated reference books The choices adopted by Phaidon, both in its publishing and distributions strategies, allow the works of some of the great artists of all times to reach the shelves of the most remote public or institutional libraries for the benefit of the general public.